Nostromo

One of the random classics lying around in my unread-books library, I recently picked up Nostromo by Joseph Conrad for no particular good reason. A great find it was though. Conrad tells the story of a fantasy Central American country, where putsches follow upon dictators follow upon putsches. His is a tale of the greed for money and power (but also love, if only for one character) and how it determines people's choices while leading to dubious individual outcomes. Ironically, one could argue that his happy ending is, well, a bit too happy to be realistic. Another sticking point for me was the inherent racism of his portrayal of indigenous or creole citizens of this non-existing republic. Conrad might have been opposed to colonialism, he is not devoid of his times' attitude towards non-White, non-Western people(s). Yet, a very enjoyable read, exploring the depravities of human life.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

I had put Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood on my e-reader quite some time ago because I had been quite obsessed with Robin Hood during my childhood. Not only had I read a German copy of his adventures, but I had of course also seen the classic Errol Flynn film, the Disney version, and even the early-90s Kevin Costner one. In a rather disappointing twist I discovered quickly that the English-language version on my e-reader was actually simply the original of the German-language copy I had read as a child. I knew all of the stories by heart then. Still, it was interesting to see how Pyle - an American author on a truly British topic - played with language to give his text an older feel (he only wrote it in the late 19th century) and also how his version differed from what is popularly seen as inherently part of the Robin Hood legend today (namely that he has a pertinent love interest, Maid Marian is mentioned only fleetingly).

Most interesting though was the Wikipedia article consumption I indulged for this blog post. It seems as if Robin Hood is in fact based on a number of ballads dating from the 14th century onwards (and which may or may not in turn be based on an actual historical figure). Yet, this Robin Hood (just like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for example) was adapted over time to suit the predominating mood or expectations. Thus, only in the 19th century does he become truly a bandit who steals from the rich to give to the poor. Pyle tells the story of how he is forced to flee into Sherwood Forest after having killed a forester who cheated him out of his winnings in a bet and then threatened his life. Yet, in one of the old ballads Pyle based his book on, Robin simply kills all 14 foresters who have also not threatened his life but merely cheated him.

Fascinating stuff about what stories mean, how they are adapted, and what the accurate version of a tale everybody knows actually is. And, oh yeah, the book was an enjoyable, fast and easy holiday reading of course.

Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon's book Mason & Dixon clearly is one for the ages. 700 pages, including extremely well-researched historical details and expounded-upon stories as well fantastical and absurd deviations on, i.e., flying mechanic ducks with (too many) feelings. The title of course refers to the surveyors that established the to-become-infamous Mason-Dixon line that divided the slave-holding South and the - less slave-holding - North of the United States. Pynchon describes Mason & Dixon's work together - and separately - before they came to America but especially once they are there. His is a bombastic book that I fail to find words for, that is impossible to get a grip on properly, which doesn't even suck one in, because it is too complicated for that, but which one is incapable of properly putting down either, and which, especially, stays with one; its stories, its absurdities.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I had read Raymond Carver's short story collection "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" a couple of years ago already (maybe a decade or so) and had kept a very positive memory of it. So when I saw it lying around the other day, I picked it up and essentially read within one evening and one morning. The speed with which I raced through this book already hints at what I thought of it, Carver has such an amazing way to describe human relations with such few words - and thus darkly... Let's hope for humanity that he is wrong about people's nature, even while his stories show all the strength of what is human-created culture.

Dagny or A Love Feast

I picked this up randomly in a very nice English-language bookstore in Tbilisi and let me tell you, it is a horrible boring novel. The author's, Zurab Karumidze, idea is fascinating enough, he factiously wants to retell Dagny Juel's - femme fatale and inspiration of the art scene in the bohemian Berlin of the late 19th century - last few days in Tbilisi before she is being killed by her lover. A young Stalin, Koba, is a character as are Georgian poets and writers, the book also abounds in impressively varied cultural and historical references. Still, the deal-breaker for me lay with the Karumidze's obsession with this Love Feast the esoteric, mystical attempt to create some kind of cosmic orgasm. Pages on end he talks about this and let's face it, I believe this to be nothing but superstitious talk empty of any meaning or significance. I came really close to not even finishing the book, which is something I usually never do.

Behind the Curtain

When visiting Ukraine earlier this year, I spent most of my last day in Kiev desperately looking for a Ukrainian novel in English (or German or French). Not much luck on that front. Book stores there either had nothing in a language other than Ukrainian or Russian or sold a few foreign classics or trashy novels. I finally hit upon a used-book store in basement somewhere sharing its entrance with a rather seedy bar. There I found the only two novels translated into English that seemingly had been written in Ukrainian (I am sure there have been many others, but again, these are the only two I found in Ukraine's capital, so there). I proceeded to buy both of them, depriving any future intellectually curious tourist of them.

And I now finally read one of them. Borys Antonenko-Davydovych's Behind the Curtain is not the greatest novel of all times. It supposedly (according to Leonid Boyko on the cover) was "a novel which provoked heated discussion in the Soviet press" though. I have to admit that I am not sure why. Really it is a relatively short account of a Ukrainian Moscow-educated doctor's experience living in Uzbekistan with his annoying wife, his mother very much of a rural background, and his young child. The doctor clearly brings improvement, modernity, to this far-flung corner of the Soviet Union (what is interesting in fact is that Communists could be as neocolonialist in their attitude towards their own backwaters as Westerners could), yet his implication in his work makes him ignore his family. In result his wife becomes ever snappier and self-centered while his mother is slowly dying of cancer. 

It is not a momentous trying to capture a given period or even region, it feels more like a literary attempt at dealing with what happened to the author to his life. Yet, at the same time this author seems incapable of drawing grander lessons from this, either for himself or for us the readers. The novel is sufficient upon itself so to speak. It is neither good nor bad in that sense, it just is.

Rue des voleurs

Un cadeau je n'avais jamais étendu parler ni Mathias Énard ni de son livre Rue des voleurs. Et pourtant le sujet a été presque obliger de m'attirer. Un jeune marocain parmi les troubles du printemps arabe, entre une histoire d'amour avec une jeune militante des indignados espagnols et son travail comme bibliothécaire d'un groupe salafiste. Effectivement c'est un récit très beau auquel le lecteur s'attache facilement et qu'il lit vite en conséquence. La fin me paraissant un peu trop mais l'auteur connaît clairement très bien son sujet, c'est à dire la vie des jeunes en Afrique du nord et leur désir pour mais aussi problèmes avec l'Europe.

Sister Carrie

I had fairly recently read An American Tragedy and picked up Sister Carrie more or less randomly when I was in New York earlier this year. With the latter being Theodore Dreiser's first novel (published in 1900 and thus 25 years earlier than the former) differences abound of course. Dreiser's naturalist and descriptive style - true very much to the novel of the 19th century and not the post-modern style emerging soon with writers such as Joyce or the great Döblin I recently discovered - is the same in both books. It makes for easy reading as it requires little concentration since everything that happens is explicitly spelled out for the reader. 

The subject matter is quite different though, or rather the result of the urban American way of living the author describes is quite different. In both novels a young character tries to make her (his) way in an urban setting. Here it is Sister Carrie trying to get a break on her own first in Chicago then in New York. And that describes aptly the scandal of the novel, on her own. Carrie effectively makes her way from one man to another (not too many really, but still), climbing the social ladder in the process until she is at its top on her own. It is undoubtedly a testament to the radical changing of morals that what feels like a perfectly normal behaviour to me (a woman living with one man, then another, then alone) was considered scandalous, even outrageous, at the time the book came out. To go back to Joyce (or Flannery O'Connor, same thing really) once more, where I as the (post-)modern reader have a hard time understanding their (at times) obsession with religious questions, the same holds true for this barriers breaking novel and its protagonist. In the end I enjoyed reading it but it's inner spirit, its fight, is very much a reflection of the conservative culture of the time, one that I note with mild interest but one that I hardly see reflected in my own life (and, less so, times) anymore.

An African In Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie's book An African in Greenland might be the most extraordinary I have ever read. In it the author recounts his decision to discover the great north - Greenland - upon reading a book including a number of pictures on that same country while in a bookshop in his native Togo as an adolescent! The story simply seems absurd and the beginning of it consisting of an injury caused by a snake and the subsequent magical healing only contributes to the reader's confusion. Yet, Kpomassie who taught himself multiple languages is on an anthropological quest and after a whole number of years (something like 10) and with the help of many strangers turned friends and the odd job here, he succeeds in effectively becoming one of the first Africans ever to have graced the shores of Greenland.

His disrespectful descriptions of Europe as much as of his native Togo (Africa) as well as - and especially of course - Greenland allowed me to simply ignore the - again - seemingly absurd story line and simply take the book for what it is: a great read.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie apparently lives in France these days and still visits Greenland occasionally (his book was published in French in 1981), his is a bizarre tale about people, cultures, and how anthropologists (discoverers of human nature or culture one could also say here) may not only come from (white) Europe but anywhere else.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The more recent American - New Yorker - literary scene (ok, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Foer) never inspired much curiosity in me. I tend to shy away from what people who are too similar - urban born and raised, educated, living in a gentrified neighborhood but pretending to be different from the gentrifiers; Foer wrote an intellectual take on why to be vegetarian for crying out loud - to me both read or write. Yet, for one reason or another I picked up Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close some time ago and it actually is a really good book.

Foer essentially tells the tale of two generations incapable of dealing with the horrors they had to deal with. On the one hand these are the grand-parents who fled from Nazi Germany without ever managing to truly start a new life in New York, on the other hand is their grand-son who lost his father in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Foer weaves these two tales, which a priori have no connection of course apart from the plight of human suffering, into a coherent total even if they never truly become one, but then maybe that's the point. He combines a sort of naive pseudo-magical realism storytelling through the grandson with letters from various characters sent to one another describing their lives and - for the most part - their failure to overcome their past. The grandparents' lives objectively seen is simply horrifying and that's the life that comes after they have come to their safe haven, the USA.

What's also interesting is how Foer throws in imagery into his text. I am not usually a fan of anything out of an ordinary white page with black writing, but his experiments with individual words or sentences on one page, or the font blending into itself as to become illegible are noteworthy to say the least. I cannot say I needed this kind of innovation but especially his last idea of this kind - consisting of a number of photographs juxtaposed - drives its point home forcefully. The book - obviously - would have been highly recommendable without these also.

Union Atlantic

Adam Haslett might be the best modern, young American writer that I know of. His short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here was amazing, his first novel Union Atlantic convinced me little based on its cover or the description on its back. Yet, I bought it anyway, based on how much I had enjoyed him before and he truly rewarded me. Haslett includes a slight bit of magical realism in his novel, which tends to irritate me a bit, but notwithstanding this small default Union Atlantic is probably the novel of the US financial (note: not the real economy) crisis that I have read so far. Haslett's book reflects the US constantly at war in the Middle East, the greed of its banks and some of the people working for them, it even includes parts about the difficulty of being a - gay but not limited to that - adolescent. His characters have made good or bad career choices, but most of them are unsatisfied one way or another. His book shows life, period. And it does so without embellishments but poignantly. Highly recommendable.

Chronicles - Volume 1

Arguably one of the most important (Western) artists of the 20th century, Bob Dylan came out with Volume 1 of his Chronicles a few years ago. I had been wanting to read them for a while but life had always intervened, so here almost ten years after they came I finally got around to reading the - German - version. I had never read anything by Dylan before, heard virtually all of his songs at least once, know most of the early ones by heart, but I didn't read any of his earlier attempts at straight out (biographical/literature) writing.

What is Chronicles then? It is not of course a faithful recounting of his (early) life, in fact it sets in for the most part with his arrival in New York with some flashbacks to his time in Minnesota, and thus fits the Dylan legend quite well. Just like in his Theme Time Radio Hour - filled with amazing music for the most part - he constantly name drops great artists and songs most of which I was not only familiar with but whom I for the most part adore myself (Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie of course). The most interesting aspect of all these names and songs (and books) might be the ones one wouldn't expect, Dylan seems to be much more read and globally informed than one might have thought. He thus name checks Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper, Rimbaud, Lord Byron...while also giving voice to the doubt as to what kind of music he recorded in the late 1980s concomitant with Kurtis Blow, NWA and the like.

Dylan hardly tells us anything about his personal life, there is virtually no gossip about his wives, about his many kids, instead much about his cultural origins, the singers he met and worked with before he became Dylan. He also goes on about his musical self-doubts as to the timeliness of his music as seen above already, but also as to his capacity to still produce something he may himself be satisfied with. Thus he mentions at one point that the producer of Oh Mercy was looking for songs such as the ones he had done in the past and yet he (Dylan) simply knew he couldn't deliver anymore.

Finally, and most noticeably maybe is his almost frontal attack of the protest or counter-culture movement he felt he was made the mouthpiece of. I see his point to some extent, he clearly wanted to be seen as an artist not as the exponent of a generation. Yet, at the same time, his early albums especially and this can be heard reflected in many of his early live recordings also, feature songs that were radical in their positioning of the time (and what concerns war and peace still are in the USA even today). It was little surprising then that he was expected to live up to his image as the spokesperson of his generation. 

Even in the German translation I read, Dylan seemingly managed to preserve the staccato of many of his songs as well as the name dropping of his later radio show. Chronciles is not great literature in the sense that Dylan's songs are amazing poetry, but they provide an interesting insight in the self-perception of someone who has to at least be considered among the greatest artists of the 20th century.

The Rum Diary

One of the first solely literature novels I had read in a while, I thoroughly enjoyed Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary. The author tells the story of a group of American journalists living hedonistically in Puerto Rico. Reminiscent of Hemingway or Graham Greene without most of the political or historical interest, it is a journalist's novel. Telling the tale of hard-drinking journalists living it up without knowing where to go, what really to look for what to do. Arguably, the end tries to criticize this kind of lifestyle to some extent - interestingly enough, or sexist enough, it is a woman who pays the ultimate price for it who is incapable of living this life without paying a price. Yet, at the end of the day the novel simply provides a glimpse into this life, nothing more, nothing less.

The Daughter of the Commandant

Recently gone on a trip to Ukraine - Kiev and Odessa - I had a rather hard time finding translated Ukrainian literature even within the country itself and thus restricted myself to - amongst others - Alexander Pushkin for my reading material. Pushkin of course is not Ukrainian - but really to clearly differentiate between Ukrainian and Russian history is quite difficult and he furthermore spent some time living in - exile in - Odessa where he promptly seduced the local governor's wife and thus had to leave more quickly than anticipated.

The Daughter of the Commandant then, where Pushkin tells the story of a Simplicissismus-like young noble posted on the Russian frontier where he and his new-found love interest are exposed to and suffer from Pugachev's Rebellion. Pushkin constant problems with the Tsarist government due to his socially critical writings and this also comes across in this - short - novel some. The young noble here comes across as naive - if later on heroic and lucky - at best, most of the higher-up officers in the army are described as incompetent or a bit corrupt, while finally the government's justice is erroneous - note: not the Tsar herself though.

In read this in one sitting - lying really - on the train from Odessa to Kiev and thought it a very enjoyable even if Pushkin's status as one of the greatest writers of Russian history was not clearly established to me with it. Curious to try and read something else of his though.

Doghouse Roses

Steve Earle is of course one of my most favorite musicians (check here for statistical proof), it was a no-brainer for me to obtain his collection of short stories Doghouse Roses then - if ten years after it had originally come out. As King Kaufman rightly puts it, this really is a songwriter moonlighting as a short story writer and some of his stories are more like songs than anything else. Earle tries to latch onto his songs style and also the kind of crude, working-class modern Southern fiction often times sounds like (Dagoberto Gilb, Larry Brown, or William Gay come to mind). The problem is, he only succeeds at this to some extent. His stories are too simplistic, too much like songs really, too often and the same can be said for his language, which works much better in the starker poetic environment of song-writing than in the prosaic world of fiction-writing. 

 

All in all a must for anybody fascinated by the living legend, activist, and torch-bearer that is Steve Earle, but I am more curious to listen to his next album than to read his second book (a novel) which came out in 2011.

Prater Violet

Christopher Isherwood famous mostly for his great Berlin trilogy wrote much more than those three novels of course yet I had hardly ever heard of any of them before. Prater Violet sees the literary Isherwood - the author is the character is not the author? - working on a film set in England under an Austrian director having fled the restrictions imposed upon him in his native country. His story is essentially a portrayal of the clash between a culturally aware and demanding director schlepping in his tow his script-writing underling and the commercially-focused producer. It is a short, enjoyable read, showing Isherwood's forte, human observations and transports a slightly melancholic understanding of humanity that I personally find quite beautiful.

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy's books were one of those too popular with hip people items I ignored during my school and university days - which I guess makes me a hipster really, except that I take care not to be hip enough to be a hipster, so where ever that leaves me. In this case I was terribly wrong. All the Pretty Horses easily was one of the better books I have recently read. McCarthy portrays a 16-year old boys quest for a life in the past, leading him and a friend on horseback into Mexico, in their backs a much more modernized United States. The novel is heavily populated with characters such as him - Faulknerian I would say or maybe simply human? - who act in a certain way not so much because they should or even - sometimes - want to, but because they simply have to and the consequences of these actions are nothing but an accepted byproduct. A beautiful novel about a man's (boy's) essential loneliness, his incapacity to fit in his own world, and his attempts to lead the kind of life he wants elsewhere.

The Lost World

The legendary author of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, also wrote other - lesser known - works of fiction (and apparently rather bizarre spiritual works). In this case he tells the story of a British expedition to a Lost World in South America where dinosaurs have survived and adventure still looms. He clearly writes in the realm of early 20th (late 19th) century British (and other) adventure authors like HG Wells or Jules Verne.

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy seems to be one of those early 20th century left-wing American classics that few people read anymore - as Irving Howe puts it in the afterword: "Do I exaggerate in saying that Theodore Dreiser has dropped out of the awareness of cultivated Americans?" Even writing this in 1964 - the original book having been published in 1925 - Howe most likely was right, yet the more important question probably is are those cultivated Americans right in having forgotten - or never heard of - him? Here the answer is far less certain.

I thought that An American Tragedy was too lengthy, too repetitive at times, of its 800 pages maybe a quarter could have been cut as they seemingly served only to repeat a point - a sentiment - that had been made abundantly clear previously. Still Dreiser provides an interesting point of view for early 20th century capitalist America, its social norms, religious predominance and hypocrisy, the moneyed social class structures. He tries to portray something that is very real then - and to the human sentiments of which I and everybody else could clearly relate to. 

As Dreiser put it himself: "A certain type of crime in the United States [...] proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially."

As cruel as it may sound I found Dreiser's novel much more interesting as an reflection of its time than as a literary work.

Berlin Noir

Like most everybody I enjoy the occasional crime novel and film noir. In particular if they take place in Berlin maybe (like The Good German) but I enjoy the regional setting in general (as with Tony Hillerman and James Lee Burke). Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir series, which consists of three novels March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem revolving around Bernie Gunther the kind of brash-talking crime hunter on the out of traditional police forces and fighting his own demons as much as others' crimes - kind of like Dave Robicheaux really only in the Berlin of the 30s.

This is not la grande littérature as you would put it in French, but it makes for an entertaining read and Kerr's research is good enough to escape my criticism with few German-language or German history errors contained in these novels. Dagmarr is spelled with one r only of course, but I had to actually read up about Arthur Nebe on Wikipedia before I could appreciate the historical accuracy of Kerr's wildly fantastic and speculative story-telling.